Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drive

It has been a while since we knocked out a review of our own but when Seagate ask if we would like to try out a new “game changing” device we were not about to say no thanks.  We’re going to take a look at the Momentus XT, a newly designed hybrid hard drive.  Many of us will remember when Seagate tried to give this a try a few years ago with little success. Luckily they took a lot away from the previous hybrid drive and didn’t give up on the idea.  Jump ahead to today and Seagate has released their second hybrid hard drive, the Momentus XT.

The Momentus XT is trying to bridge the gap between the blazing speed of a Solid State Drive (SSD) and a typical mechanical platter Hard Disc Drive (HDD).  It does this buy having a 7200rpm platter,  4GB of onboard solid state flash, and Seagate’s Adaptive Memory technology.  WTF is Adaptive Memory technology you ask? According to the guys at Seagate it is, “a groundbreaking Seagate technology that moves frequently used information into flash memory for faster access.”  The Seagate Adaptive Memory algorithm works by identifying patterns in how often certain digital data is used. It then moves the most frequently retrieved information to flash memory for faster access than from the spinning disks – effectively tailoring hard drive performance to the user and applications.   Well 4GB isn’t a very big hard drive you say, and you would be correct.  The Momentus XT currently comes in capacities of up to 500GB (250GB and 320GB are the other options).  As you may have also already figured out because of the name, the Momentus XT is a 2.5″ drive.  The final gap between SSDs and HDDs that the Momentus XT fills is price, the 500GB unit should hit the street with a MRSP of $156 (250GB – $113, 320GB – $132). A 500GB SSD would nearly require a new mortgage to be drawn on the house.

Key Features and Benefits
• Boots 40 percent faster than traditional 7200-RPM drives (for overall system performance, that’s
within 1% of an SSD*)
• Cuts costs by 75 percent compared to SSDs by combining solid state and hard drive technologies
• Delivers the perfect balance of speed and capacity
• Uses Adaptive Memory technology to optimize performance in real time by storing frequently used
files and data on the solid state drive component
• Ensures compatibility with any operating system or application with a standard 9.5mm notebook
drive form factor and the characteristics of a traditional 7200RPM drive
• Offers all the benefits of SSD performance with the high capacity, storage, battery life, power
consumption and heat generation of a traditional hard drive
*Per Seagate benchmark data, using SysMark07 combined with 4GB of RAM on the system side

- 500GB, 320GB, 250GB hard drive capacities – Sweet spot capacity points that performance enthusiasts are looking for
Ensures that you will have the capacity you need for any type of application or digital hobby—ample digital play room
- 4GB solid state flash Speeds bootup and application response time
- 7200RPM spin speed Performance that won’t increase the noise, heat or power consumption of your hard drive—speed without the excess baggage.
- Seagate Adaptive Memory Technology – Customizes system performance to the user. Usage patterns are constantly monitored and updated for dynamically improved response times.
- 32 MB cache

On to the performance of the drive.  Our test drive arrived on Friday, unfortunately this is also a holiday weekend here in Canada (where I live) and we had a ton of stuff scheduled, so I was a bit limited to what I was able to do testing wise.  All tests were done in my slightly aging desktop PC after a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium x64, plus several apps that I typically use regularly (WoW, Firefox, utorrent, Ventrilo, Dropbox, KeePass, DisplayFusion). For comparison to another HDD I used a Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive and is really only included for reference since it is an older drive and certainly not the speediest of drives currently available.  Since it generally takes running a program three times for the algorithm to put the necessary data into the flash each test was run three time and then the average of the following three runs was taken. For example the first time I ran PCMark Vantage the HDD Suite scored 5278 before jumping up several hundred points to the final average of 5806.

Intel C2D E8500 @ 4GHz
Asus P5Q-Pro
4GB G.Skill PC2-8500
BFG 9800GTX
Razer Barracuda AC-1

I started off with a good old fashioned, “How long does my PC take to start up?” test. Using a web based stopwatch on my wife’s PC I timed from pressing the power button until I saw the Windows background. No modifications were made to Windows to prevent anything from loading on start up. After half a dozen cold boots I took an average of the last 3 and came up with 47 seconds.

Next up was a HDTach running in windows XP compatibility mode.

To finish up a quick round of tests I ran PCMark Vantage full test suite.

Since I have only ran this drive for a weekend I haven’t had an opportunity to really see it perform.  However, just playing the little bit that I have with it I have seen improvements with load times for games like World of Warcraft and just an overall snappier system.  Seagate hit the spot with this drive and I think this kind of technology is going to really help bridge the gap to SSD performance without breaking the bank.  I am really looking forward to spending more time with this drive and see what else it can help improve. This would be an ideal hard drive for a performance laptop or even a netbook that you wanted to squeeze out some more performance without losing all the storage space that switching to a SSD would cause.  Overall this little drive is getting highly recommended to any user looking to get some more performance without paying the big bucks for a solid state drive.

For anyone that is interested in getting some more information, the following webcast is open to anyone.

ASUS and Seagate Unveil the Momentus XT and the ROG G73JH with a live webcast

On Wednesday, May 26, at 11 a.m. PST, Seagate and OEM customer ASUS will co-sponsor a live webcast unveiling not only the new Seagate Solid State Hybrid drive, Momentus XT, but also featuring the new ASUS ROG G73JH system with two Momentus XT drives.   Three lucky attendees of this webcast will win a new G73 system just for attending. In addition, special guest speaker and famous gaming reviewer N’Gai Croal will provide an in-depth review of the new G73 powered by Momentus XT and how this system will transform high-performance computing.

To register for this live webcast:

https://seagate-events.webex.com/seagate-events/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=644000350

Tags: hard drive, hybrid, Momentus, seagate, solid state, Storage